Officers try to cope with split-second decisions

Whatever triggers it, when a certain book falls off the shelf of Sid Matthews' memory, the retired Jacksonville police officer knows he'll dream about a deadly chapter in his 32-year career.

A silhouette is in the shadows. A white male. About 6 feet tall. Red bushy hair.

Matthews hears a shotgun blast. Then the figure falls back into the dark.

The 57-year-old never saw the damage that blast did during the burglary alarm he went to in Riverside two decades ago. But when he sleeps, his mind fills in the blanks based on accounts from colleagues at the scene.

A 14-year-old boy is face down. There is a hole in the back of his head.

"In the blink of an eye, I'd taken a life," Matthews remembered recently. "I live with it every day."

The choice to use deadly force is one that law-enforcement experts said police officers must be willing to make each day. Sometimes they only have a split second to decide.

Me or them. Life or death. Do I pull the trigger? Do I wait?

Deciding when it's necessary to shoot is part training and part instinct, said Greg DiFranza, a retired Jacksonville police officer with a doctorate who trains officers in tactics at the University of North Florida's Institute of Police Technology and Management. It's a decision that other experts agreed can change the way an officer views his or her life, job and relationships.

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"It's not like it doesn't affect them. It's not that they're cavalier," DiFranza said. "You can go through training all day long, all career long and you really don't know what you're going to do in that situation. The thing all of us truly fear is we're going to wind up killing someone."

In Matthews' deadly shooting, the officer had confronted the 14-year-old's older cousin moments before. He shot that 19-year-old suspect in the hand after the man ran at him, then squatted down with something metal in his hands.

After that he saw another figure in the darkness and opened fire again. That figure was the fleeing red-headed boy. The former cop said the metal object turned out to be the screwdriver the two used to break into the business.

In his 20-year Sheriff's Office career, DiFranza, 50, was involved in three shootings. None was deadly. He said the first, when he shot a pit bull that kept charging after he opened fire, didn't compare to the others involving people. But it haunted him.

"Just after that, I would have dreams about that, shooting a person and them continuing forward," he said.

In about two weeks' time last month, three people died in police shootings in Jacksonville, and another was injured. Whether the incidents are ruled justifiable, some who have studied police shootings said there is never a way to predict what any officer will do when confronted with a deadly force scenario.

"You already have a certain level of experience in training," DiFranza said. "But you can never replicate it. In real life that stress threat is there. Plus you have complete fear of the unknown. In real life, you get one opportunity to do it correctly."

For former Officer David Klinger of the Los Angeles Police Department, that opportunity came as a rookie with just four months on the job. Now a criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, Klinger said he shot a suspect dead in 1981 after the man attacked his police partner with a butcher knife.

Since hanging up his badge a few years later in favor of academics, Klinger has made a study of deadly force incidents and interviewed cops from across the country about their shootings. He found that at the time they fire, some officers get tunnel vision. For some, time speeds up. For others, it slows down. Some think about their families. Some worry they'll miss the shot.

"The mind is searching for something or trying to remind you that you have something worth living for and you need to prevail in this," Klinger said in a Times-Union interview last week.

Still others pull the trigger and have no recollection of it, according to the professor. He has consulted for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office on use of force issues and wrote the book Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force.

Sam Walker, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has researched deadly shootings and police accountability, said last week that unjust shootings don't follow any single pattern. What the events should spark are reviews of policy, training and officer supervision to "reduce the likelihood they're going to happen again."

In Matthews' case, it did happen again. Before he retired a few years ago, he had been in eight shootings, although only the Riverside case ended with a death.

Years later he went on to specialize in critical incident stress management and counseled police officers in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Your only hope and prayer," Matthews said, "is that you were prepared to meet the task and that you did what you were supposed to do and that it comes out right."

In the Riverside shootings, Matthews said while authorities ruled it and all the others justified, it's still a story of his career and life he wishes he could rewrite.